Just before reaching the north pole in 1990, Erling Kagge dropped to his knees on the ice. He’d been trying to open a bag of raisins while wearing thick mittens but one escaped. On all fours he flicked out his tongue like some foraging beast and licked it in to his mouth.
What, the Norwegian adventurer asked himself, is the meaning of life out there on the ice, where it’s dark for six months each year, always cold, cannibalism a possibility, where winds howl through the bones of dead explorers and where, if you encounter a polar bear, the question will be which of you will become the other’s dinner? The answer, he reflected, “lies in small daily miracles”.
The privations he and fellow explorer Børge Ousland endured during their 800km expedition on skis to the north pole – unspeakable food, rudimentary toilet facilities, non-negligible risk of death and dismemberment – made the raisin taste all the sweeter. “The feeling of sheer joy when the raisin passed my lips,” he writes, “and the sensation of it rolling around my mouth, of chewing it slowly, reminded me of a truth I already knew. It is all about the small things. A little tastes good, less tastes better.”
At the top of the world, Kagge tells us, “life is all about either hunger, frost and toil, or satisfaction, warmth and rest”. That lure, apart from the quests for knowledge and glory, proved attractive to the forbiddingly butch men whose adventures he hymns in this heart-catching, austere history.
Using skis, dogs, reindeer, sleds, boats, submarines, silken balloons equipped with cut-glass champagne glasses, airships fitted with velvet chairs, or simply on foot, many have tried and many have failed to reach the latitude of 90 degrees north. None of them, Kagge included, is like me, essentially risk-averse, cosseted and in agreement with what Blaise Pascal wrote: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Alpha males strut these pages, bearing out the boringly heteronormative charge of US president Teddy Roosevelt, who supported a failed expedition to put the American flag on the north pole, that mimsy modern men need such role models to counter rising feminisation and effeteness.
Nonetheless, in our materially glutted 21st century, where we are spoilt for choice and lose our souls amid fatuous possessions, the existential urge to go north is comprehensible even to wimps like me. Kagge is inspired by Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, who argued that human abilities are overdeveloped compared with the constrained lives we lead. We are not suited to be civilised. Only through low-tech struggle in rugged climes can we find meaning. “I adore that thought,” writes Kagge. “People’s need to make everything easier is destroying our opportunities for great experiences.”
Suffering is key to enlightenment and joy for Kagge. He cites Dostoevsky: “With pain man must buy his future happiness.” That said, it was the pain of the polar bear, whom he and Ousland shot a few days into his 1990 expedition, that helped buy their happiness. After posing for photographs next to its corpse, they butchered the bear and savoured its flesh.
These Norwegians didn’t go quite as far as an explorer Kagge writes about, who used a slain bear’s feet to wear as boots. Nor did they have the difficulty with a bear that teenage shipmate Horatio Nelson faced on a polar ice floe. Nelson’s rifle misfired, so he grabbed the gun’s barrel and clubbed the onrushing beast.
Many of the men whose expeditions Kagge memorialises – and they all are men – had father issues. Kagge lists several whose dads died early and tells us of his own Oedipal struggle. Kagge had hoped that “by freezing, starving and experiencing great danger” he might win his dad’s respect. Instead, when he and Ousland returned triumphant after becoming the first humans to reach the north pole without support from machine or beast, Kagge’s dad said: “I don’t know why you ever went to the north pole. I always thought it was a ridiculous thing to do.”
The few women who figure in Kagge’s history are armchair travellers, projecting into imaginative space what patriarchal society denied them in reality. In her novel The Blazing World, the 17th-century writer and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Margaret Cavendish, imagined her beautiful heroine being kidnapped by a sailor and rescued by bear-like creatures before pitching up at a golden city called Paradise beyond the north pole, over which she becomes empress. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein concludes with the murderous monster fleeing his creator to the north pole. It is, for Kagge, a morality tale in which human hubris and the desire to master nature rather than work with it are indicted.
The north pole was a suggestive enigma long before human foot ever trod its pack ice. According to Herodotus, it was paradisiacal home to a people called the Hyperboreans. Astronomer Royal Edmond Halley maintained that if you walk far north enough, the planet’s surface turns inwards, leading you inside the Earth. If you keep walking, Halley supposed, you’ll arrive at the centre of the Earth and encounter a people living reasonably contentedly, though presumably with quite poor wifi. For centuries, no polar explorer got beyond 80 degrees north, so Halley’s barmy account remained unverifiable.
Kagge also drolly traces the north pole as locus for national pride. Mussolini’s lackeys flew a fascist blimp over it, airdropping the Italian flag to claim the realm for Il Duce. In 2007, submariners planted the Russian flag on the ocean bed directly below the north pole. The British were prominent in polar exploration and graceless when bested by other nation’s heroes. The greatest polar explorer, Roald Amundsen, caused a diplomatic incident by asserting that “by and large the British are a race of very bad losers”. Which, if not the worst of what we are, sounds about right.
For many centuries, explorers deludedly supposed that the most northerly latitudes were ice free. Possibly beyond the ring of ice was a polar land of lush vegetation where hitherto unknown wildlife thrived. Many a poor soul died icebound, gangrenous and heartbroken in pursuit of that folly.
Ironically, climate change may make that discredited theory of an ice-free north pole a reality. “After 75,000 generations with an ice-covered Arctic Ocean,” writes Kagge, “we may be the first to experience an ice-free Arctic in the summer.”
The north pole, Kagge amusingly suggests near the end of this big book of ripping yarns and existential angst, is not a place. Unlike the south pole, which is located on land, the north pole consists of air, water and ice. You fall asleep at the north pole, wake up, check your sextant and find you’ve drifted off the top of the world a few degrees. Just possibly then, the north pole doesn’t really exist and nobody, despite competing claims and photographic evidence, has ever reached it.
For all that, the north pole that Kagge describes visiting is enchanting. Up there, he relates, time travel is possible, since “it only takes a few steps to walk around the world and cross 24 time zones. If you walk with the sun, in other words west, 360 degrees around the polar point, you walk into yesterday when you pass the dateline. If you then turn round and walk against the sun, or east, after circling once, you step into the future.”
How fabulous! I imagine Kagge on top of the world at the end of his expedition, walking in little delighted circles on the ice – before it all melted away as if it had been a dream.
• The North Pole: The History of an Obsession by Erling Kagge is published by Viking (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
